BookBub's New Releases for Less - My Experience

Every author knows Bookbub as the Master of Advertising. If you are picked for a feature you’re all but assured of a great sales day and residual bumps. (Most of the time) Heck, I remember when they started and I was one of the first dozen or so authors to get a feature. But note, that didn’t give me any special privileges. I still get rejected by them.

Recently I was able to try the latest feature, ‘New Releases for Less’. Googling this didn’t breed many results. I only read people stating they heard ‘mixed results’. I couldn’t find one dedicated article, so I decided to write one.

I read a comment on a post that they accept everyone. Not true. I had two rejected for new releases for less. That being said, my latest novel, The Black, was accepted under horror and here’s what I learned, but I didn’t just watch my book.

It’s important to note that they base their decision on your release price, so doing a Countdown deal of .99 won’t work unless you contact them ahead of time.

The email

An email is sent out in the early afternoon (EST). It targets readers who subscribe to those categories. In my copy of the email, there were three books. Mine and two others. I tried to reach out to these other authors to get their opinion, but one was like trying to contact a mythical creature, no FB or website. The other just didn’t get back to me.

Anyhow, let me start by saying my book was at a disadvantage going into this ad campaign. A recent Amazon glitch caused my book to be without a rank. For ten out of fourteen days it was not listed in any categories and therefore unsearchable other than by my name. Yeah, that sucked. So it started out pretty bad compared to my other new releases.

RESULTS

There were three books in the email.

The Black – by Me (2.99 – Horror)

The Signal - Philipp Calvert and Joshua T. Calvert (0.99 – Sci Fi)

Not Like Yesterday – Ava Strong (4.99 – Psychological Thriller)

Here is how I charted the ABSR (Amazon Best Seller Rank)

 

Now for the breakdown.

To be fair I used the KDP Rank Calculator to estimate sale. Even on mine, which by the way, if I break down page reads as book sales (Divide by KENP #), it comes pretty close to the calculator.

 

The Black – Release Price $2.99

Est Three-day unit sales – 104

Cost of ad -                 $260.00

 Est. Royalties             $208.24

Loss/Profit                  -$51.76

Opinion – Not great, but not bad. I really think the glitch put my book at a disadvantage, but only the next several days will tell. Like all books sales go up and down. The difference in rank wasn’t grand, but hopefully, it will make a difference.

Not Like Yesterday – Release Price $4.99

Est Three-day unit sales – 29

Cost of ad -                 $700.00

Est. Royalties              $101.30

Loss/Profit                  -$598.70

Opinion – While the massive jump from a rank of 238,000 down to 18,000 is super impressive, as authors we know to go from 238K to 50k takes only a couple sales. Her hardest jump wa from 33k to 18k. I wish the author would have replied to my email, I really wanted to know what she thought.

 

The Signal – Release Price $.99

Note this was not a countdown deal so the author royalties are $.034 a book.

EST Three-day unit sales – 610

Cost of ad -                 $400.00

Est. Royalties              $207.40

Loss/Profit                  -$196.60

Opinion – Impressive freaking jump in best seller rank. However, setting a price of 99 cents with a 35% royalty was risky. In order just to get the money back on the ad the author needed to sell 1200 books roughly in 3 days, which is possible. But not with this type of ad. Even though they took a hit, I’m gonna say the ad worked for them because it’s a book one.

In Conclusion

So what does this tell me. The ad can work if your book is at the right price. I don’t think $4.99 is a new release for less (Unless you’re Stephen King), I think $4.99 is a new release for an average Indie Author Price. The Category has 1.4 million subscribers, you have to wonder how many opened that email and were like, ‘not for less’. I wonder how many she would have sold had she priced it at 1.99

The .99 book rocked as far as sales go but profit margin was lost, however, the strategy for a first book in a series paid off. The thing they did was think it through, come up with a plan.

In looking at the stats I didn’t do too bad. Would I do it again? Yes, but I would plan it through with a strategy to at least break even, and hopefully wihtout another horrible glitch throwing me behind the 8 ball.